Skip to primary menu Skip to main content Skip to footer content

Building community wealth and resilience through community-owned real estate, entrepreneurship programs, and access to capital for Black and brown neighborhoods

This information is provided for educational purposes only, not intended as investment guidance.

Groundcover

is a reparative integrated capital fund launched in 2023, managed by The Guild.

Groundcover’s mission is to seed and develop community-owned real estate that creates pathways for marginalized communities to build wealth, resilience, and self-determination.

Overview Deck for the Guild

📍 Location: Atlanta, GA

💰 Fund Size: $30M

🤝🏽 Ownership (General Partner): The Guild, a 100% worker-owned cooperative

💸 Check Size: $250,000-$2M

Investment Thesis & Criteria

Over the last few years, The Guild has worked towards its mission of building community wealth and power through serving as developer and ecosystem builder of community-owned real estate models. We’ve learned a few things in the process, and have since sharpened our focus on raising reparative capital — layering grants, PRIs and MRIs (program-related and mission-related investments), and other low-cost, uncollateralized debt — from philanthropic institutions and values-aligned HNWs (high net-worth individuals).

Additionally, it is also these community members — residential tenants, small business owners, workers serving their communities — that are creating the actual value for these projects, by being thoughtful stewards of these assets. It is thus inequitable for financial returns to only accrue to capital holders, instead of all community stakeholders.

Bridging the speed & trust gap: To get to critical mass and momentum for the collective ownership movement that we envision, the ‘deal by deal’ approach akin to our pilot projects is great, but not sufficient. This is especially true given the long investment horizons of real estate development, and trying to adequately match non-extractive sources of capital to our uses.

When properties do come on the market, community-based organizations often don’t have the capital (liquidity) to act quickly to purchase them for communal ownership and stewardship.

On the flip side, even if communities are sufficiently organized to acquire and develop assets in their neighborhoods, they are often considered too small for investors, banks or CDFIs

Rebalancing risks and returns: It is our firm belief that it is communities, not typical capital holders, that bear the real risks when it comes to development. Working class neighborhood residents are the ones at risk of losing their homes when developments focus on profit maximization and increasing property values.

Using the above lens, Groundcover will invest in projects with the following criteria:

🌱 Development models that are regenerative to communities, i.e. that take properties permanently off the speculative market through some form of community ownership and governance — this could be a cooperative, land trust, community investment trust, or The Guild’s own model of a Community Stewardship Trust

👷🏾‍♀️ Mixed-use, residential, or commercial real estate that have a development team comprised of majority people of color

The Guild is able to offer our development services on projects that require it as a supplementary offering to Groundcover’s capital, but it is not a requirement to receive investment.

We seek investment from foundations, family offices, and accredited investors that understand that our work involves a focus on repairing historic harms and inequities, and thus requires investment terms that do not replicate market conditions:

👉🏾 Unrestricted grants, recoverable grants and forgivable loans

👉🏾 PRIs, MRIs, or other low-cost, uncollateralized debt in the 0-3% range

👉🏾 Investment horizons of 5-15 years

Traction

We currently have 7 deals in progress that serve as examples of what the fund will continue to invest in. Please see attached deck above and our websites for more details. Other traction includes:

  • $10.75M in capital secured; $8.5M deployed for Groundcover (in addition to CDFI and public financing secured for specific deals)
  • Projects in our current waterway:
  • 800+ community stewards, 50 small businesses and community-based organizations engaged in The Guild’s programs
  • The Guild’s solidarity economy series in Summer 2024 saw ~50-75 paid attendees per training session
  • Ongoing consulting and programming partnerships with local municipality, land trusts, land banks, CDFIs, and philanthropic organizations
  • Ongoing capacity-building programs with BIPOC developers, nonprofits, and housing organizers

Other relevant information: Potential investors may find this Black Paper on Equitable Real Estate Finance we co-authored useful.

Contact info: Nikishka Iyengar, Founder & CEO, nikishka@theguild.community

Websites: www.groundcover.us & www.theguild.community